Akhila Kolisetty serves as a Development Advisor of Justice for All Organization (JFAO), a non-profit that works to strengthen the rule of law and expand access to legal services for women and girls in Afghanistan. Starting in fall 2012, she is also a student at Harvard Law School, and aspires to a career in human rights and development, with a focus on community-based legal services and women's rights. In the past, she's studied legal empowerment at the grassroots level with BRAC in Bangladesh, worked with a civil rights law firm in Washington D.C., and counseled South Asian immigrant survivors of domestic violence. She graduated from Northwestern University in 2010, where she studied at the London School of Economics and wrote an honours thesis on transitional justice in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. This is a cross post from her blog.

We all want to be part of NGOs that do good work and are effective in helping poor and vulnerable people. However, what sort of qualities should these NGOs have. Using her experience in the non-profit sector, Akhila Kolisetty puts forward her own ideas. What do you think? Do you have any further suggestions?

Navigating how Gen Y fits into the workplace seems like such an enormous task, but Akhila Kolisetty is willing to give it a shot. In this post, she explains how identifying purpose, and throwing in a little patience, might just be the answer to finding meaningful work for our generation in development.

Is a rights-based approach being lost in the midst of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and monitoring and evaluation? Akhila, while acknowledging that tangible results are important in development interventions, suggests that we are forgetting the rights-based approach. Implementing approaches that try to address the underlying problems of structural inequalities is crucial in achieving sustainable results.

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MissionCreep Episode 11

In Episode 11, Brendan, Carly and Weh discuss badges, roads and snark. Join the conversation on Twitter #missioncreepdev or email the team with your questions to info@whydev.org